Newton's Lodi family reunites after day of Boston Marathon chaos

Tuesday

Apr 16, 2013 at 12:01 AMApr 16, 2013 at 4:00 PM

Liz Lodi turned her car into the Prudential Center parking lot and rushed through the mall to Boylston Street. The Newton resident has done it each year her daughter, Hannah, and husband, Rus, have run the Boston Marathon. She greets them several times on the course throughout the race, with the final time being as they triumphantly approach the finish line. Only this time, when she looked down Boylston Street for her family, all she saw was emptiness.

Scott Souza

Liz Lodi turned her car into the Prudential Center parking lot and rushed through the mall to Boylston Street.

The Newton resident has done it each year her daughter, Hannah, and husband, Rus, have run the Boston Marathon. She greets them several times on the course throughout the race, with the final time being as they each triumphantly approach the finish line.

Only this time, when she looked down Boylston Street for her family, all she saw was emptiness.

At about the same time, Hannah, a Newton South alumna running for the Metropolitan Boston Housing Project, was racing through Coolidge Corner. Someone ran in front of her and told her not to run near the trashcans, that they were exploding near the finish line where her mother and father would soon be arriving.

Meanwhile, Rus was caught in the middle of his wife and daughter in Kenmore Square. He thought it was odd when pedestrians started crossing the street, and runners began to turn around so close to accomplishing their goal of finishing 26.2 miles of one of the world’s most celebrated races.

“I started to eavesdrop on other runners,” Rus said, "and all I heard was: 'It’s a bomb. It’s a bomb.'"

Three hours later, the Lodis reunited at their Newton home.

Hannah was stopped just short of the Citgo sign near Mile 25, walked to Boston University, then got rides to Cleveland Circle and Brighton before a friend brought her to her parents’ house. Rus turned around after running nearly 26 miles, and walked more than two miles more – without cell phone reception - to his mother-in-law’s near Washington Square in Brookline. Liz, who’d left her cell phone and purse in the car in an attempt to beat her family to the finish line, was forced away from the Prudential garage by emergency personnel trying to clear the area for more than an hour before she finally worked her way back to her car, which she then drove to her mother’s to meet her husband.

Hours after the moment the city will never forget, the Lodis were still trying to comprehend the day that started out so bright and full of promise, and turned into a fog of surreal uncertainty.

“There were no cars on Beacon Street, the T was shut down, everything was empty,” Rus Lodi said. “It was a ghost town.

“It felt like one of those clips you watch of 9/11 where people are just wandering through the city. After having run a marathon, it was like we were all zombies.”

Liz had a similar feeling closer to the spot of the detonations.

“I was struck with how calm everybody was,” she said. “People looked tired and they looked confused. The thing that was amazing was you would think your first instinct would be to run away from something like that, but people didn’t really do that. They just stopped.”

Hannah said she and the runners she was with didn’t quite know how to react when first told what had happened, so they kept running. She estimated they kept going for another 30 minutes, but admitted she lost track of exactly what was going on as her adrenaline ramped back up after what had been a physically draining early part of the race.

“We didn’t really know the extent of what was going on,” she said. “We heard something happen at the finish line, but we were also being told they might re-route us and have us finish somewhere else. I tried to calculate where my friends might be at that time. There was one friend I was most concerned about being right near there, but I (have since heard) she’s OK.”

Hannah said she still wasn’t sure of many of the details of the blasts and their aftermath more than an hour after arriving to her childhood home. She was still coming down from here race high, and hadn’t brought herself to turn on news coverage yet.

“I think with the adrenaline I haven’t really processed it yet,” she said shortly after 6 p.m. Monday night. “I am just trying to get the word out to all my friends across the country that I’m safe.”

After all the training, all the work, and all the planning that went into this day, that’s what became the only thing that really matter by that night.

“People were hurt and people lost their lives,” Rus said. “The running of the Marathon is totally secondary.

“Everybody is just really pissed that something like this ruined one of the great days in Boston every year.”